They are just arrays, like everything else in the language. If you don't want to manage plain arrays, better look for a different language.

You are free to make good use of strings as arrays. I've written tons of code including firmware for MCU so I think I'll keep to my own practices.

they are not "just" arrays, they are arrays with a null-terminated expectation. Most of the time. The lack of consistency and difficulty communicating the expectations is what is hair-pulling in C, and that's on top of the difficulty of communicating the difference between an array and a pointer in C.